Magnetohydrodynamic Shocks in Nonequatorial Plasma Flows around a Black Hole

We study magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) standing shocks in inflowing plasmas in ablack hole magnetosphere. Fast and intermediate shock formation is explored inSchwarzschild and Kerr geometry to illustrate general relativistic effects. Wefind that non-equatorial standing MHD shocks are physically possible, creatinga very hot plasma region close to the event horizon. Shocked downstream plasmascan be heated or magnetized depending on the values of various magneticfield-aligned parameters. Then we may expect high-energy thermal/nonthermalemissions from the shocked region. We present the properties of non-equatorialMHD shocks and discuss the shocked plasma region in the black holemagnetosphere. We also investigate the effects of the poloidal magnetic fieldand the black hole spin on the properties of shocks, and show that both effectscan modify the distribution of the shock front and shock strength. We find forstrong MHD shock formation that fast rotating magnetic fields are necessary.The physics of non-equatorial MHD shocks in the black hole magnetosphere couldbe very important when we are to construct the central engine model of variousastrophysical phenomena.Comment: 29 pages, 7 b/w figures, accepted to ApJ (v3), figure labels correcte